[SPEAKER_01]: The queer family about gas, love is love is love on the queer family about gas, love is love is love on the queer family about gas, love is love is love on the queer family about gas, love is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she said to me at one point, very thoughtfully, she said, what'd be gift to be able to live as more than one sex in the same lifetime?
[SPEAKER_02]: And that turned me around to see it as a gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, and I have never forgotten that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome, welcome, welcome, y'all to the queer family podcast, the show about family, but with gay.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your gay host, Jamie, and this is the show that highlight celebrates uplifts and normalizes.
[SPEAKER_02]: A little bit to cool off.
[SPEAKER_02]: families and all of our fabulous shapes and identities and all of our fabulousness and has been sharing queer family goodness for 23 seasons.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, you heard me right.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is season 23 and I have been really great episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: coming in for you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got to sit down with Reed Vanderberg.
[SPEAKER_02]: Reed is an amazing, amazing, human who's been a part of our community, the Ligipita Qua community for more than 50 years, and listening to Reed really reminded me just how much has changed for our community and how much hope still exists.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is going to leave you with lots of hope.
[SPEAKER_02]: We talk about what happens when you don't have the language to understand yourself and why representation matters so much and how one person choosing to live authentically can create ripple effects that change countless other lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really good when we also talk about chosen family empathy and why sometimes the most important relationship you will ever build is actually with yourself.
[SPEAKER_02]: This conversation is going to give you the feels and I'm excited for you to hear from Reed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Before I roll that tape though, in queer family matters, have a little story that I want to tell you about my son.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, my eight-year-old, we have just started watching young Sheldon together.
[SPEAKER_02]: He likes it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I like it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we had a moment last night when we were watching it, where the dad was like griping about having to take Sheldon on a trip.
[SPEAKER_02]: He didn't want to take Sheldon on a trip because Sheldon and him don't get along.
[SPEAKER_02]: He wants to take him fishing, but Sheldon doesn't like fishing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So he was like, ah, let me just not take him or whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the mom said, oh, no, you have to take him.
[SPEAKER_02]: She little boys who grow up without their fathers taking them places turn into weirdos.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I could see my son's head, his, the gears turning in his head, and I was thinking, oh, he's a little boy.
[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't have a father.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then he looked at me, he said, what does weirdo mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it wasn't the word weirdo.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he said, what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: I said, it means kind of like to saying that they grow up weird.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I was like, I have to fix this, because he doesn't have a father.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has two moms.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I said she doesn't mean that like you have to have a dad to not grow up like a weirdo.
[SPEAKER_02]: She just means that like if you have two parents and one of them doesn't show up as much or or doesn't want to hang out with you, then kids tend to grow up differently.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how I said it, but it was such a like a lesbian mom moment, honestly.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I found myself kind of caught off guard and not sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: How to handle it?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I handled it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, and I think I satisfied his curiosity there, but I think it's a conversation that I'm going to have to circle back to.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love the show, and I don't think it was bad the comments you made, and it was funny, and it was a funny moment, and it was really just a joke about how the dad just doesn't know how to get along with children, because he's super smart, and the dads and sports are whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: But perhaps maybe saying that little boys who grow up without their fathers is not the most responsible thing to say to an audience full of people who might have grown up without fathers.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, it was a moment we talked through it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to circle back and talk through it some more, because I don't want my son to think that growing up without a dad is going to make him a who, how weirdo or whatever they said.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't even remember what they said.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, that is my, um,
[SPEAKER_02]: weekly parenting news.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I'm sure there'll be another one tonight, but that's my new one.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going to circle back.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if any of y'all have ideas for how to navigate that conversation when it comes up on TV, things like that get said, shoot in my way.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am always open to suggestions for how we should make sure our little ones are feeling, um, seen and valued and loved in their families.
[SPEAKER_02]: Alright, anyway, let's, let's get to Reed's conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're gonna love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to Season 23.
[SPEAKER_02]: And let's roll the tape.
[SPEAKER_02]: Helen, Bula, let's get in here, ladies.
[SPEAKER_02]: Put the cigarettes down, put the whiskey, bring the whiskey over.
[SPEAKER_02]: I might take a sip.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, let's roll this tape.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here we go.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ha ha.
[SPEAKER_02]: Clear family, but good, still love is love.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi, Reed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, hello there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for having a good show.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for coming.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a pleasure to have you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm really excited to dive into all the things we're going to discuss.
[SPEAKER_02]: But before we do so, I got to do your 30 second elevator pitch.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the listeners at home can have a nutshell overview of who you are, why you're here talking to the clear fam squad.
[SPEAKER_02]: So on your mark, get set.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go, Reed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a retired therapist of Transman.
[SPEAKER_00]: I transitioned over 30 years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: I became a therapist because the ones I worked with in transition were not helpful to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote my memoir a few years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: I written a couple of other books.
[SPEAKER_00]: I basically wanted to be a service to my people.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I worked with hundreds of trans clients along the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: I sing in the Portland Gaman's chorus, and I see my 30 seconds are up right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I like that you got the chorus and they're a good job.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm excited to chat with you Reed and also you didn't mention that you are also a step parent to probably grown adult by now, but you're a step parent.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you do have a little bit of a step parenting blended family story, which I think we're going to dive into as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: But let's start back 30 years ago, you said you transitioned.
[SPEAKER_02]: Roughly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can we go into that?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'd love to hear just your journey towards that because I think in the questionnaire you filled out to come on the show you did mentioned that you had been living as Lesbian for quite some time before that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'd love to hear the lack of representation and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I was born in 1955 by grew up in San Francisco also.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and my era, I could hear the hippie bongo drums and golden gate park from my bedroom window, and that was my childhood, and it was fabulous, and I knew nothing about queer identity of any sort.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though it was San Francisco, it was a time when
[SPEAKER_00]: everybody was very harsh, harsh, and quiet, and secret, and private, even in San Francisco.
[SPEAKER_02]: Reed, I'll say, even I was a teenager in the 90s, and I'll say even then, it was kind of taboo, like it was there, it was all around us, but it's not something that was like discussed openly in every household.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, now it was also the 80s epidemic, so that kind of pushed things back into the closet more than they were in the 70s.
[SPEAKER_02]: Very true.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was 19 going to City College as San Francisco, I fell in love with Michelle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought, oh, no wonder I always felt kind of different.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like I didn't quite fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I must be a lesbian.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I never looked back from that interpretation, because I was surrounded by lesbians and gay men in the early to men's 70s in San Francisco.
[SPEAKER_00]: That place was bursting at the scenes with this exuberant lesbian and gay energy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I never occurred to me that might not be the right interpretation of identity, because I really was in love with her.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was true.
[SPEAKER_00]: What wasn't true is that that meant that I was okay
[SPEAKER_00]: living as a woman myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it never occurred to me to question that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I spent the next 20 something years living and lesbian community still, not quite fitting in, still being kind of anxious, not quite finding the right relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just thought I needed to find the right relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I didn't understand is that I needed to find the right relationship with myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you don't have that, you can't be in right relationship with anybody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I was in a relationship and that made me even more desperate because all of a sudden, I'm in this relationship we buy a house together on paper.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks like I've got it all now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have the relationship why am I still even more unhappy because it didn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't fix me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really didn't know to put it that way at the time, but that's what was going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in 1995, I still remember this mid April 1995, my partner said to me one night, I've always felt like a man inside and if I had the money, I'd have an operation tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, my partner had always known there was this male persona inside and that's a difference between us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: but that was there, my partner knew that about himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I say him now, but it wasn't him at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd always known, but what he didn't know is that you could do something about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that gets back to the invisibility of trans identity as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he thought he just had to live with this kind of like having an imaginary friend.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he read an article about a trans man.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought, oh my God, you can transition fact direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the next thing he did, he came home and he told me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll tell you, as a therapist, I worked with a lot of clients who had been in denial of identity the way I had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: That level of my partner saying that to me was like an existential two by four to the head.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my denial could not survive it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I went into a breakdown over that because the whole point of denial is you're protecting yourself from something you're not ready to face.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't ready to face it, but there it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had to, I was forced to face it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it took a while for me to recover from that existential blow.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really went into a serious breakdown over that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And your partner began to transition, it sounds like.
[SPEAKER_00]: Partner began right away because he'd always known, he'd never been in denial.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he didn't have to kind of rebuild himself after having been destroyed, basically, essentially destroyed.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what it felt like to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it wasn't his fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed to transition, so he went off and he did, much earlier than I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took me a couple of years to really realize, okay, I have to extricate myself from lesbian community.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a founding member of the Portland Lesbian choir in 1986, and by that time nine years later, that group was the center of my life, and leaving that group was the hardest part of my transition.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I couldn't know then that I would one day become a member of the Portland Game End Score, so I'm going on 18 years now, but how would I know that in 1995 I didn't?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why did you need to kind of extracate yourself?
[SPEAKER_02]: I've never gone through transition, so I don't know, so I'm just curious.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why did you feel the need to extracate yourself from your community?
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew that I would end up sounding and looking like this, I wouldn't be a lesbian anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, right.
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: That immunity of all communities.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the one that's going to welcome the presence of someone who's male presenting, who's taking testosterone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Testosterone was considered almost like a, people would refer to it as testosterone poisoning when they wouldn't have bad encounters with men.
[SPEAKER_00]: of batting counters are pretty much any kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a community that had a lot of respect for men.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you're in the heart of that community, she and her are the only pronouns.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now things have shifted a little bit over the years, but still in the Portland Game End Scores, we have something of every identity possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we can't really change the name.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a 45-year-old organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the fourth oldest guy identified chorus in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how do you change the name?
[SPEAKER_00]: What we did instead was to change the mission statement.
[SPEAKER_00]: It used to say we uplift the gay community.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we uplift our community.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we just recently did a concert called Transformation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's about exactly what you would think it would be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the end of that concert, every trans and non-binary member of that course, step forward to the edge of the stage to hold hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were 20 something people down there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, out of about 150.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it really times have changed a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they can't change the name of the organization, but the organization itself welcomes everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I can't see that level of identity being present in the portal must be inquire.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's just really different within women's community.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's women's space.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's this is us bonding with each other and we're living in a patriarchal society.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I would imagine, you know, well, first of all, we're in the art community is nothing without all of us in my opinion.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I would imagine that trans women would be welcomed into the lesbian, yeah, yeah, I hear you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are some who still have the attitude once a man always a man.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if they have surgery,
[SPEAKER_00]: and having worked with as many trans women as I have as a therapist, it takes a long time to undo the acculturation of your socialization.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we're raised in the 50s or 60s as a boy, or as a girl, either one, we don't even really know how deep those gender roles run in us until we start to challenge them and try to live a different one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we realized there's all these unwritten rules that we didn't even know we were following.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't know the unwritten rules that we're supposed to know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so people end up behaving in ways that look a little odd to others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know why you just did that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's weird.
[SPEAKER_02]: The patriarchy is strong.
[SPEAKER_02]: Extremely strong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are some left beings that still hold that old school kind of attitude, but many don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even the older ones who witnessed my transition, their my age, and many of them are quite accepting of trans women.
[SPEAKER_00]: They witnessed my transition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were very upset when I left the choir, but they weren't upset because I was trans.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were upset because I was leaving.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bonds are strong in the choruses.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an incredibly strong bond.
[SPEAKER_02]: Things have changed tremendously, and I do feel like in regards to what I like to call the Ligipita Qua community, I like to make it sound fancy.
[SPEAKER_02]: We are opening up and expanding and becoming more accepting.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think the young people are helping us get there.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're helping us.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think conversations like this are so important for those who still might be
[SPEAKER_02]: holding on to some biases from previous lives, previous times.
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing I like to point out, because I do a lot of presentations and trainings in what not, and I've gone into a number of senior centers and help them understand what they need to know to be supportive of their grandchildren, is generally where they're coming from.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one thing I point out to them is that there's a huge difference in the way that identity is
[SPEAKER_00]: is seeing these days.
[SPEAKER_00]: LGBTQ IAA plus and different people have different letters that they will use.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some will use some of the letters and not others.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of not controversy exactly, but just a lot of individual interpretation.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's really different from when I came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was lesbian and gay community and that was it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even me too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the question arises.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, why is it so different now?
[SPEAKER_00]: And speaking as a therapist here and looking at generational differences and passing down traditions across generations, I think we have second way feminism to think because the messages of the 1970s feminist movement were take yourself seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: be true to yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't let other people define you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now we're witnessing the grandchildren of those feminists doing exactly that.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they don't find a label in that acronym that will fit them, they'll invent a new one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they're taking themselves seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: My generation, we fit ourselves into the boxes as best we could.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this generation, if there is a box that fits them, they'll invent a new one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's really healthy because it means that they are seeing themselves as individuals worthy of Finding their own space and defining themselves and living true to themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I think about the future in two generations, those people are going to be our community elders.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is really heartening.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know some people in their late teens are late to mid-20s and they are so thoughtful and so respectful of each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: They aren't going to assume pronouns on the part of someone they've just met and that's so different from my generation's approach.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I come out to some of the older women in particular, they're like, oh wow, our legacy playing out, they've never occurred to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a good perspective, and also just to note that this train is moving.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's running, get on board, or get left behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right, and it's not going to be stopped by anybody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that gives me hope for the future as well, given the current administration.
[SPEAKER_00]: they're digging their heels and trying to prevent change that is inevitable.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's inevitable, and they're going to do their dang best to stop it, but good luck, good luck.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just hopefully nobody gets hurt.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they're doing a lot of damage in the meantime, but that doesn't mean they'll succeed in the long run.
[SPEAKER_02]: Agreed, agreed.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'd love to take it back to you went through realization and you weren't ready for it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not using the words you used, but can we take it back and how did you get through that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, this is this is one reason I became a therapist because the therapist I saw at the time, so first time I'd ever saw therapy and because I'd been part of lesbian community, my whole adult life, of course I went to a gay and lesbian community center here, not a counseling center, sorry.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't realize it's a time that that wasn't going to be particularly helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that they were trying to talk me out of anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they didn't really understand what it was they were witnessing.
[SPEAKER_00]: What they were witnessing was identity emergence.
[SPEAKER_00]: But at that time, gender identity disorder was still in the DSM.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was still considered a mental disorder.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you look it up in the DSM of that era, it says things like consistent life-long knowledge of discomfort and anxiety around gender.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't have life-long knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had not known what the problem was.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't understand what it was until about two weeks before my first appointment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my therapist said, how long have you felt like this?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, oh, a couple of weeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she thought, well, that can't be it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's impossible.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not what is written in the books, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, it must be something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's going to be back because I had just realized, oh, my God, me too.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took me a while to realize that.
[SPEAKER_00]: My breakdown at first had to do with my partner's revelation.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I thought anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: that my breakdown of identity and who I was had to do with my partner's revelation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I saw that also in clients down the road, their partners.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've been with, let's say that you are in a straight marriage for 25 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of a sudden, your quote has been says to you, well, I've always felt like a woman inside and I just can't take it anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to do something about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: If your husband has always felt like a woman inside, then who are you?
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that mean you're a lesbian?
[SPEAKER_00]: what does it mean about your relationship?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you stay with this person?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to stay with this person?
[SPEAKER_00]: Erase is all these questions and there's a lot of anxiety and I thought that's where my breakdown was coming from when my partner came out to meet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took me a couple of months to realize this isn't about my partner, this is about my identity breaking down and who I am and that's when I saw therapy and that's when the therapist didn't believe me
[SPEAKER_00]: And eventually, I had started, I had online conversations, very deep conversations with other trans people at that point.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no such thing as Facebook or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had email, and that was it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I realized I was helping a lot of people by email, just helping them figure out who they were and what they wanted to do with their lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought, I'm getting a lot of satisfaction out of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought I could do better than those therapists.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I went back to school and became a therapist myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was one of the first trans therapists anywhere, really.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were some therapists earlier who had been trans, but they hadn't been out as being trans, and that wasn't why they became therapists.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was one of the first to become a therapist with an intention of serving my own and it was very powerful work to do I worked with several hundred clients and I came to realize that my story didn't know quite what it was in denial my whole life something happened and I realized half of my clients have that same story.
[SPEAKER_00]: the other thing's like I knew from before I could talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I heard those different stories.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've heard both stories as well, just here on this show.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and both of them are universal and both of them are true.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when it comes to identity, I think it's safe to say anything can be true.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's the point is to believe people, and that was one of the things that I certainly applied in my therapy practice because my original therapist did not believe me, and so the power of what I was going through was kind of lost on her.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, it's not because she was trying to talk me out of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This wasn't anything like what you would think of as conversion therapy, not at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: She just had a misunderstanding on a fundamental level of what it was
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not for you to understand.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just for you to acknowledge and listen.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the main thing, especially if you're talking about someone who's a relative of your psychic, if you're an older woman and one of your grandkids comes out to you and says, I'm non-binary.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don't know what they're talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have no idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't really ask them because non-binary in particular is difficult.
[SPEAKER_00]: That term is really problematic because
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't have language yet for what the person is, and that makes it really easy to dismiss it as not being an identity at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I've heard so many people talk about it and try to find language for it that I've realized, no, this is a thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gender is, we have this binary view of the world, it's black and white, you're this or that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, take that saying, it's like night and day.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we say it as if they're opposites, but day fades into night, fades back into day, and where do you draw the line?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing binary about nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's our culture and it's artificial.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think, finally, there's space developing for people to acknowledge and recognize their own identity is not this or the
[SPEAKER_02]: Just to carry your metaphor on, I exist in the dusk.
[SPEAKER_02]: I exist in the sunset.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, this is I'm there, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I love that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that, actually.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, I'm in the twilight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, and when do you think about the effect of the feminist movement?
[SPEAKER_00]: encouraging people to take themselves seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why we're seeing the emergence of all these identities that really had no space to exist 30 years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there was no such thing as non-binary in the language.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't mean the people weren't there, but they were fitting themselves into the available boxes as best they could.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they were fitting into the binary as best they could.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the goal is to break down the binary.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just like the goal is to break down the picture, Rocky, we got to break down this binary, too, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Really hard to do because the culture, everything is this or that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just the current state of politics, if you look at all the maps that you can see on Facebook and whatnot, Red State, Blue State,
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I live in the middle of Portland.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very blue city, but that doesn't mean there are people here who didn't vote for Trump or who did vote for Trump.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not only one thing or the other, and if you view it that way, then you can take people as individuals and listen to them and hear their stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: and here all complex they are, all of them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, we're a very assorted, assorted race of humanity here.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're so right, and I love, the argument always goes to calling me out for being a leftist, a Democrat, like it's like, I don't think in terms of democratness.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think in terms of what aligns with my values.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so to your point.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so you see the therapist doesn't work well for you.
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you get to where you are now, like?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I give credit constantly to a lesbian friend of mine long-term friend named Anita.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said to me, she's bisexual.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she said to me at one point, very thoughtfully, she said, what'd it give to be able to live as more than one sex in the same lifetime?
[SPEAKER_01]: Mhm.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that turned me around to see it as a gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have never forgotten that and I've given her credit in presentation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So number of times and sometimes she's been in the audience and I would able to say thank you Anita and she would not like you're welcome.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she's absolutely right and this is one of the things if you deconstruct how trans identity is viewed in the US in our culture, it's viewed completely negatively as this really horrible thing that you have to conquer or you have to come to terms with having this horrible identity kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the way it's phrased and the way that we're raised to believe it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you think about it, as a therapist, I could sit with a couple in my office and it didn't matter what gender they'd been assigned it for if I had lived it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of being able to relate to people, I did a presentation for the Portland Lesbian choir about a year and a half ago about intergenerational issues in the choruses.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was speaking from personal experience in that chorus as well as in the men's chorus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was wondering mixed choruses as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So being able to look at life from a lived perspective of what it's like to be male or female in the U.S. That's huge advantage in terms of relationships
[SPEAKER_02]: And it gives you a huge amount of empathy for all aspects for all genders.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think about that with my family, our families as well, like our kids growing up in families with same sex parents, and our kids might end up being straight, which will forgive them.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's OK. Like my daughter has come out of a straight, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, however, like, on the same note, with, you know, being the gift of being able to experience
[SPEAKER_02]: My daughter has grown up knowing loving her same-sex moms and knowing and has huge empathy for for the clear community.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now she's going to go out into the world as a straight woman and carry that knowledge with her.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's why I think, you know, that's one of the reasons same-sex parents need to exist even more because we're raising some real empathetic loving little kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the same thing is true with trans parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: were of trans people who were married to folks who already had kids or they already had kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those kids are growing up with a different level of knowledge of gender than they would have had otherwise.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yep, 100% 100%.
[SPEAKER_02]: So well, maybe that's a great segue into kind of your step parent journey and you're because I don't think I'm assuming you and your partner at the time
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I realize now, with 30 years of hindsight, and I might have realized it with 20 years of hindsight, that what brought us together was this kind of existential angst about gender.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that was far and away the longest relationship I had and must be in community.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never bought a house with anybody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were together seven years before my partner had this self-revaluation and then told me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that's what brought us together to begin with.
[SPEAKER_00]: But once we broke up and once I embarked on transition and became on the path of right relationship to myself, that was all the relationship I needed and I bounced in that for years in being happy by myself, being content in this relationship with myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've never been content like that in lesbian community at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been looking for the relationship and now I finally had it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: eight years into transition I was singing in a mixed course and this woman walked into the room at first rehearsal to join the course and I saw her from 30 feet away and I thought, oh my god, there she is and two years later we were married.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and she had a daughter at the time 15 and.
[SPEAKER_00]: she wanted to live with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she moved from your gene to live with us in Portland.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was great.
[SPEAKER_00]: She started going to high school here in Portland.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she immediately joined the GSA with a gay straight alliance in her school in honor of me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Had a girl.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and now she's married and and she doesn't have any kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: She doesn't really want kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's not someone who wants to be a parent.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's that's another thing about this generation.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's made a deliberate conscious choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I don't want to be a parent and so she's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they've never really questioned that or thought twice about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, things have changed a lot and also there's a lot more.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot, we get a lot further to go.
[SPEAKER_02]: But things have, when you think, when you look at it that way, you know, things have really changed a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: It seems like you are thriving, happy, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Transelder as you described yourself to me, I believe.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not, I didn't make, I didn't put that.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you're right, I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very much the youngest child in my family.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first time I got called an elder, it was quite a shock.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now I've come to terms with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You bring a lot of really wonderful perspective to just the whole community really and just identity and general and gender and I appreciate your input.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there's one story I would like to tell you, this is one of the most incredible things that ever happened to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was on the board of Portland Peaflack here for about 10 years and I
[SPEAKER_00]: and in January of 2023, this email came in from this woman in the UK and she was looking for a place to plant this trans youth who had been living with her for several months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his name was Theo.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had escaped from his family in Southern California.
[SPEAKER_00]: The day he turned 18 he applied for an expedited passport and he flew himself to the UK.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had met his boyfriend
[SPEAKER_00]: So Theo flew himself to Manchester, Jack's mother Wendy said yes, you're welcome to look with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Theo's family was extremely conservative, religious, anti-trans anti-queer in any kind of way and he knew he could never transition within that family.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he saved up money that he earned from selling bagels, money he earned from walking dogs, all kinds of jobs that he had, he saved up his money and got himself to the UK and he sent his parents a text from the airport while he's waiting to get on the plane.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said when you can use my right name and pronoun, feel free to contact me and he's never heard from them since.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Wendy realized pretty early on that he had the wrong kind of visa to stay in the UK.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a tourist visa which is only good for six months and he wanted to go to school there and live there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he had to apply for a student visa which many had to come back to the US.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so intricate on whole process of applying for visas.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had to come back to the US and be here for at least six months before he could leave again for the UK.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Wendy was searching all over the US.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where am I going to plant this kid?
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't know anybody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: He can't go back to his family.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's only 18 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was terrified for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And somebody, I'll never know who or why, said you should contact Portland Peacock.
[SPEAKER_00]: very specific and I don't know two different people in two different states in the U.S. She was emailing all over the U.S. trying to find a place to put him.
[SPEAKER_00]: She heard back from hardly anybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few people responded and said, well, we might have someplace for him, but he has to be here before we know whether we'll have a place or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she wasn't going to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: She needed to know he had a place.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I got back to her right away when she sent the email to Portland,
[SPEAKER_00]: 10 days later, they landed in Portland.
[SPEAKER_00]: two days before his visa expired.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am so proud of Portland because Theo lived with us for the next seven months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in that seven months, he did things I can't think he could do anywhere else in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: He not only got his warm own prescription, got on hormones, he had chest surgery.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the waiting list for chest surgery is usually a couple of years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kaiser jumped through hoops to get him in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like this war, you know, just in time so that he could recover before he had to go back to the UK and start
[SPEAKER_00]: this school program again.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's saying with the Portland Gaiman's course and a concert that we did in June of 2023.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now he's been back in the UK for three years.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's well along in transition.
[SPEAKER_00]: We assume every other week or so.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we think of him as our neogram son.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the one.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we have now, he came back to visit last year.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's coming this year around the time for my birthday.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we had the money, we would both be going back and forth all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when was when when did this happen?
[SPEAKER_00]: He came to stay with us in January 2023.
[SPEAKER_00]: Portland is an oasis.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was really proven.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always proven.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's off to be that for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that even more so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I just cannot think of any where else in the world he could have been where he could have had chest surgery in that length of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something every Transman wants badly.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is important to most Transmen as hormones, because a part of the social expression of gender in a way that lower surgery is not.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's much more private.
[SPEAKER_00]: But not having a chest is just such a huge burden.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's relief from somebody once they have chest surgery.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the UK, the weight is so long that the national health care system just doesn't have the capacity to really be waiting years and years for that kind of surgery.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even here, the weight list is a couple of years, but they got them in.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's great, you know, gender of farming care is life saving and absolutely, everybody needs to understand and get on board with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll save a lot of lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I wonder if this had happened a couple years later, if you, if it would have been as smooth as it sounds like it was, like before we're into the Trump administration.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, partly because of the over 18, but really
[SPEAKER_00]: and transition is still quite possible here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they're not gonna mess with us, not success.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just so proud of Portland, like I played cards monthly with the same group of people and right after Wendy contacted me, I was still thinking about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like 24 hours later I'm playing cards with these friends of mine and I told the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of my friends is a therapist and he said, I'll give him free therapy while he's here.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how Portland is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's who wrote his chess surgery and hormone referral letters.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is kind of giving him free therapy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was floored by that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that is one of the kindest and most generous offers I've ever heard.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And therapy is not cheap.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_02]: if people want to get a hold of you or you have a couple of books.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I wrote the book transition and beyond observations on gender identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: After my oldest sister died, she was only 62, she had cancer and I thought, oh my god, that's really young and I thought, okay, I better write down what I know, what I've learned.
[SPEAKER_00]: while I'm here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was almost 20 years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm still here, obviously.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it really motivated me to get the word out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wrote this book transition and beyond.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wrote the book I wish to have been available to my therapist.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I started to transition my mother, my best friend and lesbian community, I was basically explaining what it really means and how you really go about it and what's really most useful for a therapist to understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that book has been used as a textbook in some counseling programs over the years and and yeah it was really really useful to people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I actually embarked on the process of beginning to retire after I wrote that book because I was doing a book reading at one point and it was so powerful the question and answer and I thought I became a therapist to write this book and that really stuck with me and I thought yeah that is why I was doing this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't because I
[SPEAKER_00]: So I did retire in 2011.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I thought, well, what's my next book about?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I was having coffee with a friend, a trans woman friend who volunteered at a gay and lesbian community center here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said to me, you know, every now and then something happens at Q Center.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll think, I just don't understand gay men.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it really struck me, and I thought, well, no, why would you?
[SPEAKER_00]: You never warm one.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the wrote a book called Journey to Transformation, stories from across the acronym, and I tried to explain the acronym to each other, because especially for people who are straight and cisgender, which means you're content with your birth and your assignment,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really easy to think that if you're part of LGBTQ plus community, you all understand each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is so not true.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of misunderstanding across the acronym of what it means to be trans or non-binary.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a cisgender lesbian, for example, you might not understand why.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second half of that book is just stories that I got from different people living different identities and told their stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the third book I wrote was my memoir.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote the first half when I was in graduate school.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote my leg and I had a non-walking cast for six months, about six months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I finished my master's thesis six months early and I was bored and I thought, okay, I got to do something.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wrote the first half.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was only not even quite 50 years old and I thought this is too young to publish on memoir.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not on my hard drive for 20 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: then we had quarantine and COVID and I was bored again and I thought okay now I'm gonna write the second half and this time I think I'll publish it because now I'm almost 70.
[SPEAKER_02]: There you go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah so I titled that one work in progress.
[SPEAKER_00]: aren't we all yeah yeah that's amazing and everybody and people can find your books wherever you buy books I'm assuming or yeah just depends on what bookstores you've got and if you want and if you any of you listeners if any of you are so inclined have your bookstore order them
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because 100%.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, work.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just all you have to do, and your local library, too, you can request that your library order as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: That would be nice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my website is a revanderberg.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: Read to vanderberg.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that'll be in the show notes, so anybody can just click good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so easy to misspelled.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, this has been such a pleasure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Read.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story, and I think it's going to resonate with a lot of people.
[SPEAKER_02]: So appreciate you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Queer family but ghost.
[SPEAKER_02]: Whew, well folks, I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I enjoyed it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you did enjoy it, feel free to listen to another or watch another.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have so many episodes for your listening or viewing pleasure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just go pick one and enjoy.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot, there really is.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also, if you really do like this show, please, I know I say it all the time, but please do consider supporting the show on Patreon.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're just gonna go to patreon.com, slash the queer family podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're gonna pick a tear, you're gonna join, and you're gonna get that bonus content.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're also gonna get my love and adoration for the rest of my life.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love you all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for tuning in, keep on tuning in.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'll see you next time.